Meanjin’s Tournament of Books 2012, Matches 3 to 6

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As I promised in my first post on this year’s tournament – whether you wanted it or not  – I’m back with a progress report on the tournament. And, I must say, I’m rather thrilled with the results to date. I haven’t read all the contenders so my reaction is more than a little subjective but my favourite authors and some favourite stories are doing well.

Match 3: Thea Astley’s “Hunting the wild pineapple” defeated Tara June Winch’s “It’s too difficult to explain”

Thea Astley, as I’ve said before, is one of my favourite writers. I have read several of her novels, but she had a long and prolific career and so there’s still a lot for me to read. Her short story collection, Hunting the wild pineapple, is one I’ve yet to read. I also haven’t read the Tara June Winch story so I’m flying completely blind. I’d like to support the young, up and coming writer, but in my heart I’m glad Astley is through to the next round. I want to see her better recognised!

I loved the fact that the judge of this round, John Hunter, recognised (not that it’s relevant to this particular competition) Thea Astley’s Miles Franklin achievement when he says that she “single-handedly kept up the women’s quota of Miles Franklin Awards for decades. Even today I think not many people know this. Anyhow, he describes Astley’s short story as “social observation written with a razor blade”. I couldn’t describe Astley better myself.

Match 4: Elizabeth Jolley’s “Five acre virgin” defeated Sonya Hartnett’s “Any dog”

Of all the matches, this is the one that mattered most to me, not only because Elizabeth Jolley is another of my favourite writers, but because this short story is one of the few I nominated in Meanjin‘s call for nominations on its blog. Estelle Tang, who judged this one, starts by commenting on the humour. This is one of the reasons I love Jolley, her wit, satire and irony. She’s dark but she makes you laugh despite yourself. “Five acre virgin” was my first Jolley. It introduced me to her interest in and empathy for the underdog, the marginalised and the outsider in our society, issues that she explores regularly in her fiction. Tang describes the story as “the classic swimming duck, an unassuming facade masking the maelstrom beneath” which could be a good description for Jolley herself. On the outside, she looked like a sweet little old lady but underneath was something far sharper. She was one funny, cluey woman.

Match 5: Josephine Rowe’s “In the mornings we would sometimes hear him singing” defeated Murray Bail’s “A.B.C.D-Z”

Of the four matches I’m reporting on today, this is the one I have least vested interest in because I’ve read neither of the short stories. However, I have read a couple of novels by Murray Bail and like his writing so on a purely subjective basis, I’d have been happy to see him win. However, the judge Jo Case calls Rowe’s prose “exquisite”, describes the story as “a mood piece” and says it’s “a seductive read”. I must locate a copy.

Match 6: Barbara Baynton’s “Squeaker’s Mate” defeated Frank Moorhouse’s “The Annual Conference of 1930 and South Dada”

Regular readers of this blog will probably remember that I reviewed “Squeaker’s Mate” last month. It’s a great story and offers such a different perspective on the “bush myth” that, although I haven’t read Moorhouse’s probably very worthy story, I am very glad to see Baynton win. Patrick Pittman who judged this match said that Baynton was new to him, and that the piece came as “a complete surprise”. He comments on its “sparse and unrelenting prose” and on its gender politics which “is radical and unsettling, if not always pin-downable”. I know what he means. Baynton is not simplistic – and should be better known.

Recap

Did you notice that these four rounds, which involved 6 female and 2 male writers, were all won by women? This is not a gender war … but it’s good to see some under-appreciated women gaining recognition.

Monday musings on Australian literature: ACT Writers Showcase

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It’s been a good week for literature in the ACT. Not only was the UC Book Project announced but on Thursday, our centenary anthology The invisible thread was launched.

Irma Gold, The invisible thread

Irma Gold, editor, at the launch of The invisible Thread

The launch was a well-organised event: it found the perfect balance between formality and informality, and didn’t run too long! The book was launched by writer Felicity Packard, best known as one of the award winning writers on the Underbelly series. She spoke entertainingly about the invisible threads – people, places, events – between her and the book. It was nicely and appropriately done. She was followed by four readings from the book, three by authors Blanche d’Alpuget, Adrian Caesar and Francesca Rendle-Short, and one by Meredith McKinney, daughter of Judith Wright. Being of a certain age, I related to the fact that Wright’s and Caesar’s poems both dealt in some way with age. Editor Irma Gold concluded the launch with the usual thanks … and the whole was emceed by local radio announcer Alex Sloan. The venue – the New Acton courtyard – was perfect for the warm spring evening. It was a treat to be present.

The invisible thread, by Irma Gold

Cover (Courtesy: Irma Gold and Halstead Press)

Irma has also been interviewing many of the still-living authors included in the anthology. The interviews – and the stylish book trailer – can be seen on her You Tube channel. Well worth checking out during those hazy lazy post-Christmas days if you don’t have time now. Nigel Featherstone whom I’ve reviewed is there, as is the exciting poet and rap artist Omar Musa, as is the new-to-me poet Melinda Smith, as is … well you get the point. More interviews are to be added weekly over the next couple of months.

But, these are not, really, the point of today’s post. At the launch Irma announced another initiative associated with the book – wow, that woman has worked hard. It’s the ACT Writers Showcase, a website dedicated to, obviously, showcasing writers from the ACT. Irma explained at the launch that the anthology includes only 70 of the 100 plus writers considered for it. The showcase is an attempt to ensure that all writers are noticed, promoted and, most importantly, receive the due they deserve. Irma, herself, for example, is not in the book – but she is in the showcase.

Authors can be located via the search box or the writers’ index. There is a brief bio and list of publications for each author, and an excerpt of their work. I’m told this is a pretty unique site – but, whether it is or not, it’s not only a great resource for readers but also makes a significant contribution to documenting “all that’s past and what’s to come”* in ACT literary culture.

Are you aware of any similar initiatives in your corner of the world?

* from “A Valediction”, by Adrian Caesar

Impressive reading initiative from the University of Canberra

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How proud am I? Not that I had anything to do with it, but the University of Canberra, in my city, has launched an inspiring initiative which it calls the UC Book Project. This is a project whereby every student (yes every student) who commences a course (yes any course) at the University of Canberra in 2013 will be given the same book, in print or electronic form, and will be required (yes required) to read it!

The aim of the project is, according to the University’s website, “to enhance the first-year experience of students, increase their knowledge of contemporary and global issues, and foster a sense of community among students”.

Have you ever heard of such a thing? I hadn’t, but apparently, according to the project’s major proponent Professor Nick Klomp*, many universities around the world have a “freshman or common reading program”. How can a university manage to ensure that every student in every course read one particular book? Well, the website says that:

Different courses will incorporate the concepts and content of the book in different ways, and there are several activities planned for the year for which students will need to have read the book.

The University will also encourage students to engage in an online discussion about the book. Anyone will be able to read the discussion but only staff and students will be able to post comments. Fair enough.

Ok, so what’s the project’s inaugural book? Just wait, it’s coming, but first I want to tell you that it was selected by a panel comprising Deputy Vice Chancellor Nick Klomp, Professor of Arts and Humanities Jen Webb, Director-General of the National Library of Australia Anne-Marie Schirtlich, Patron of the National Year of Reading William McInnes, and local award-winning author (whom I’ve reviewed twice in this blog) Nigel Featherstone. What fun they must have had trying to choose one book!

Anyhow, enough rabbiting on. It’s time to tell you the book: Craig Silvey‘s Jasper Jones. This Western Australian novel made quite a splash when it was published in 2009 and is, I think, a great fit for the purpose. It’s readable and not too long; it has a good plot that draws you along, and some wonderful dialogue; it’s a coming-of-age novel but is not specifically young adult; and, without it or me being crass, it ticks some boxes relating to multicultural and indigenous Australia. In a word, it’s real in a way that should appeal to a wide range of students. I read and reviewed Jasper Jones here (early in my blogging career).

Congratulations to the University of Canberra for a truly wonderful initiative and many thanks to Nigel Featherstone for bringing it to my attention. I can’t believe how hard Nigel works for literature in the ACT region (and Australia) while still managing to write himself. I dips me lid to ‘im!

* And, readers, would you believe that Professor Klomp is a scientist!? I dips me lid to ‘im too!

Poor novellas?

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Having just reviewed two novellas in succession – Nigel Featherstone’s I’m ready now and Gerald Murnane‘s The plains – I was intrigued to receive an email this week from AbeBooks titled “The best novellas: Literature’s middle child”. It linked to an article which starts:

Poor novellas. They are the middle-child, the Jan Brady of the book world – too short to be novels, too long to be short stories.

Joe Fassler in The Atlantic earlier this year also used a family-based metaphor to describe novellas:

Longer than a short story but shorter than a novel, the form has been the ugly stepchild of the literary world.

So, are novellas poor? Are they “the ugly stepchild”? Well yes, in some ways they are because, as I understand it, publishers are not keen to publish them. Fassler confirms this, stating that novellas are “an unfairly neglected literary art form that’s been practiced for centuries by celebrated writers” and yet face “an ongoing struggle for commercial viability”. One of the problems seems to be that they “hog too much space to appear in magazines and literary journals, but they’re usually too slight to release as books”. This made me wonder whether the the e-Book might result in a greater acceptance of novellas. You can’t, after all, see that you’re taking home a slim volume can you!

Things are changing, though, says Fassler. American publisher, Melville House, decided in 2004 to publish a series of classic novellas by such writers as Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoevsky, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. They were apparently derided in the industry for publishing novellas and for using plain covers. Had the critics never heard of Penguin?  But, the novellas sold – and sold – and kept on selling.

There is a catch, however: they’re classics. Apparently, it’s not so easy to sell contemporary novellas. They are more expensive to produce because their authors are alive and need to be paid. Fair enough, eh, Nigel and Gerald? So, people will buy classic novellas because they are by well-known authors and cheap, but are not so keen to buy contemporary ones. Melville House is not giving up though. They are apparently looking at using the electronic media (told you!) and adding curated materials “to extend the experience”. They’re starting with some classics, but plan to move onto contemporary works.

Joe Fassler ends his article with a definition – always the challenge – which goes like this:

a narrative of middle length with nothing wrong with it, an ideal iteration of its own terms, that can [be] devoured within a single day of reading. I think I’m not alone when I say this is the kind of reading I like best. On a summer Sunday, sometime. We fall under the book’s spell in the morning. A friend knocks, the phone rings, the mail clunks through the mail slot. There won’t be any stopping until there’s nothing left to read. The tempo builds until the pages turn with feverish speed, the sun burns hot and starts to dim. Finally, we’re released sometime before dinner. The spell lingers on all through the evening until, at night, we dream.

Good one, but I also rather like John Clanchy’s definition which novella writer Nigel Featherstone quotes in his blog:

Whatever we call it, the novella isn’t a novel that’s run out of puff; it isn’t a short story that’s meandered beyond its natural length and lost its way. I like working with the novella because it shares some of the most attractive features of the novel – its expansiveness, its multiple layers of theme and plot – at the same time constraining them with features normally associated with the short story: intensity of focus, singularity of narrative voice and architecture, discipline of length. But all the while remaining a distinct species, not a hybrid.

Funnily enough, Melville House’s new novella initiative is called Hybrid Books. Ah well, each to their own … I don’t care what novellas are called really as long as they continue to be written and published because, as I’ve said before, I like the form.

Gerald Murnane, The plains (Review)

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Gerald Murnane, The Plains, bookcover

Bookcover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

Wayne Macauley, he of the Most Underrated Book Award fame, wrote in his introduction to my edition of Gerald Murnane‘s The plains that “you might not know where Murnane is taking you but you can’t help being taken”. That’s a perfect description of my experience of reading this now classic novella. It was like confronting a chimera – the lower case one, not the upper case – or, perhaps, a mirage. The more I read and felt I was getting close, the more it seemed to slip from my grasp, but it was worth the ride.

The plains was first published in 1982, which is, really, a generation ago. Australia had a conservative government. We still suffered from cultural cringe and also still felt that the outback defined us. All this may help explain the novel, but then again, it may not. However, as paradoxes and contradictions are part of the novel’s style, I make no apologies for that statement.

I’m not going to try to describe the plot, because it barely has one. It also has no named characters. However, it does have a loose sort of story, which revolves around the narrator who, at the start of the novel, is a young man who journeys to “the plains” in order to make a film. It doesn’t really spoil the non-existent plot to say he never does make the film. He does, however, acquire a patron – one of the wealthy landowners – who supports him in his endeavour over the next couple of decades. It is probably one of Murnane’s little ironies that our filmmaker spends more time writing. He says near the end:

For these men were confident that the more I strove to depict even one distinctive landscape – one arrangement of light and surfaces to suggest a moment on some plain I was sure of – the more I would lose myself in the manifold ways of words with no known plains behind them.

Hang onto that idea of sureness or certainty.

The book has a mythic feel to it, partly because of the lack of character names and the vagueness regarding place – we are somewhere in “Inner Australia” – and partly because of the philosophical, though by no means dry, tone. In fact, rather than being dry, the novel is rather humorous, if you are open to it. Some of this humour comes from a sense of the absurd that accompanies the novel, some from actual scenes, and some from the often paradoxical mind-bending ideas explored.

So, what is the novel about? Well, there’s the challenge, but I’ll start with the epigraph which comes from Australian explorer Thomas Mitchell‘s Three expeditions into the interior of eastern Australia, “We had at length discovered a country ready for the immediate reception of civilised man …”. Bound up in this epigraph are three notions – “interior”, “country” and “civilised”. These, in their multiple meanings, underpin the novel.

Take “interior”. Our narrator’s film is to be called The Interior. It is about “the interior” of the country, the plains, but it is also about the interior, the self, and how we define ourselves. While there are no named characters, there are people on the plains and there’s a sense of sophisticated thinking going on. Some plainspeople want to define the plains – their country, the interior – while others prefer to see them almost as undefinable, or “boundless”, as extending beyond what they can see or know. The plainspeople are “civilised” in the sense that they have their own artists, writers, philosophers, but it is hard for we readers to grasp just what this “civilisation” does for them. Is it a positive force? Does it make life better? “Civilised”, of course, has multiple meanings and as we read the novel we wonder just what sort of civilisation has ensconced itself on the plains.

These concepts frame the big picture but, as I was reading, I was confronted by idea after idea. My notes are peppered with jottings such as “tyranny of distance” and boundless landscapes; cultural cringe; exploration and yearning; portrait of the artist; time; history and its arbitrariness; illusion versus reality. These, and the myriad other ideas thrown up at us, are all worthy of discussion but if I engaged with them all my post would end up being longer than the novella, so I’ll just look at the issue of history, illusion and reality.

Towards the end of the novel we learn that our narrator’s patron likes to create “scenes”, something like living tableaux in which he assembles “men and women from the throng of guests in poses and attitudes of his own choosing and then taking photographs”. What is fascinating about this is the narrator’s ruminations on the later use of these “tedious tableaux” which have been created by a man who, in fact, admits he does not like “the art of photography”, doesn’t believe that photographs can represent the “visible world”. The landowner contrives the photos, placing people in groupings, asking them to look in certain directions. Our narrator says

There was no gross falsification of the events of the day. But all the collections of prints seemed meant to confuse, if not the few people who asked to ‘look at themselves’ afterwards, then perhaps the people who might come across the photographs years later, in their search for the earliest evidence that certain lives would proceed as they had in fact proceeded.

In other words, while the photos might document things that happened they don’t really represent the reality of the day, who spent time with whom, who was interested in whom and what. They might in fact give rise to a sense of certainty about life on the plains that is tenuous at best.

Much of the novel explores the idea of certainty and the sense that it is, perhaps, founded upon something very unstable. Murnane’s plainspeople tend to be more interested in possibilities rather than certainties. For them possibilities, once made concrete, are no longer of interest. It is in this vein that our narrator’s landowner suggests that darkness – which, when you think about it, represents infinite possibility – is the only reality.

The plains could be seen as the perfect novel for readers, because you can, within reason, pretty much make of it what you will. If this appeals to you, I recommend you read it. If it doesn’t, Murnane may not be the writer for you.

Lisa at ANZLitLovers, a Murnane fan, has reviewed The plains

Gerald Murnane
The plains
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2012 (orig. published 1982)
174pp.
ISBN: 9781921922275

Monday musings on Australian literature: Writing across the fiction-nonfiction divide

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Last week, a conference called the NonfictioNow Confence 2012 was held in Melbourne. It went for four days! It sounds right up my alley but I didn’t get to it. Fortunately the site says that panel discussions will be online in 2013.

Anyhow, it got me thinking about writers who write both fiction and non-fiction because, while I mainly read fiction, I enjoy non-fiction immensely and would read more if I could find the time. I started to wonder whether this phenomenon of writers spanning both forms was a new one that was somehow indicative of new ways of thinking about fiction and non-fiction, about writing from the imagination versus from reality. (Is this – has it ever been – a real dichotomy?). But, I quickly realised that it has been ever thus, that while there have always been writers who specialise in one form, there have also always been those who dabble (and I don’t mean that pejoratively) across multiple forms and genres. Think Charles Dickens, for example, or George Orwell.

For some writers, I suspect, writing like that was (still is) about making a living. Novelists, for example, might write journalism and/or other non-fiction to survive. But, for others, it’s a matter of the right form for the right subject. I’ve written in this blog about Kate Grenville and her decision to write The secret river as fiction, when her plan had been to write a non-fiction work about her ancestor. And, I’ve written about Anna Funder, who had planned to write Stasiland as fiction but changed her mind and wrote it as non-fiction. Grenville and Funder had well-articulated reasons for their decisions and these reasons had something to do with being “true” to the subject matter they’d chosen.

Funder said that having interviewed people for Stasiland, she felt it would dishonour them and their lives to turn their stories to fiction. So, she wrote a non-fictional work, but one with a certain novelistic sensibility. She is a “character” in the book providing a narrative coherence to the stories being told, and the book is structured in such a way that it can almost be said to have a plot. Funder then went on to write a novel, All that I am, which, like Stasiland, has been nominated for and/or won multiple awards. Her decision regarding form clearly seems to be about aesthetics and ethics, rather than about practicalities.

As a blogger for NonfictioNow wrote, Helen Garner who has written across almost all forms*, is the Australian poster girl for talking about “the similarities, differences, cross-overs and relationships between fiction and non-fiction writing”. Her fiction – particularly her first novel Monkey Grip and her most recent The spare room – has been panned by some for being “just” about her life as if, somehow, that wasn’t valid. But, as Garner said at the time of her first novel, whether it is about her life or not, she still had to select and frame the story and think about the language she would use to convey her feelings and ideas. Writer Tegan Bennet Daylight recently visited Garner in The Australian. She wrote of Monkey grip:

For me, at least, Garner had cracked narrative open. She had written, in a way, the kind of fiction Virginia Woolf had aspired to in novels such as The Waves and, indeed, achieved in her own diaries. She had followed a consciousness that did not bend easily into the more traditional shape of a novel. She had written a women’s novel.

Ah … I don’t think I’ll go there right now – there’s too much to unpack in terms of “the narrative” and “a woman’s novel” though I’d love to ask Daylight whether she means a novel written for women or in a style that speaks to some sort of women’s view of the world.

I’ll simply say, because I haven’t time to write more, that there seems to be a flourishing of Australian writers – particularly, it seems, women – writing – and writing successfully – across the divide. They include, in addition to Garner and Funder, Chloe Hooper and Charlotte Wood. While, as I said at the beginning, this is not a new phenomenon, my sense is that many of these writers are in fact forging a new way of writing non-fiction and, conversely, a new approach to fiction.

Do you read much non-fiction? Are you seeing new ways of writing non-fiction that seems to be informed by the techniques, and aesthetic even, of fiction – and do you think this is risky business?

* Garner has written novels, short stories, film/play scripts, essays and non-fiction books.

Nigel Featherstone, I’m ready now (Review)

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Featherston, I'm ready now, book cover

Book cover (Courtesy: Blemish Press)

Way back in my youth when I started studying literature, I thought I had to get the “right” interpretation. It made reading a little scary, I must say. However, as I gained confidence, I discovered that there are as many responses to a novel as there are readers, something I was reminded of when I attended this week’s launch of Nigel Featherstone’s novella, I’m ready now. And here’s why…

The book was launched by Canberra journalist and biographer, Chris Wallace. She spoke eloquently about the book telling us that it’s about how you can make a change in your life no matter how old you are – whether you’re 30 as Gordon is in the book or 50 as his mother, Lynne, is. She said too that it promotes the idea of living an imaginative life. I thought, yes, she’s right, it does do these things. And then Nigel spoke, and he said that for him the book can be summed up in one word, liberation. And I thought, yes, I can see how it’s that. But I had framed it a little differently from my reading.

Before I give you my different-but-on-a-similar-track take, I’d better tell you something about the plot. It has a small cast of characters, which is pretty much what you’d expect in a novella. They are Gordon, a gay man turning 30 who lives in Glebe and works as a photographer; his old schoolfriend Shanie, who followed Gordon to Sydney; Levi, Gordon’s boyfriend of a year or so; and Gordon’s mother Lynne who, recently widowed, comes up from Hobart to stay with Gordon for a short while. Lynne has put the large family home on the market, and the auction will be held while she’s away. Meanwhile, Gordon is almost at the end of his Year of Living Ridiculously, which is a year of rather self-destructive high living that he designed, and is doggedly keeping to, for his 30th year. He plans to crown this year with something he calls The Ultimate. But then Mum, Lynne, arrives, and puts The Ultimate at risk. What Gordon doesn’t know is that his mother has a grand plan herself, now that she’s free. (Ha! Liberation you see.)

This sounds pretty simple, really, doesn’t it? However, there are complications. Lynne’s husband, Eddie, was not Gordon’s father. Gordon’s father, Patric Finn, walked out on him and his mum when he was around a year old, and neither has completely resolved the abandonment. It’s not that Eddie wasn’t a good husband and father, because he was, but he never fully understood Gordon, and for Lynne he was “a head kind of love, not a heart kind of love”.

What is lovely about Featherstone’s writing – as I also found in his Fall on me – is that he manages to build tension and mystery around his characters’ behaviour without undermining their realness or humanity, and without alienating us readers. We warm to them even while we wonder about the wisdom of their decisions and motivations. Featherstone also uses imagery and allusions lightly. Water, for example, can be a cliched symbol in stories of change and growth, but here it’s appropriate and not laboured. What more logical thing is there to do on a hot night in Sydney than to go for a dip in the sea?

Besides the characterisation, I also like the novella’s voice and structure. It’s told first person in the alternating voices of Lynne and Gordon, and is effectively paced, largely through varying the length of the chapters*. The book opens with a mere half-page chapter in Lynne’s voice, and then moves to mostly longer ones in the main part of the book. They shorten towards the end as the pace builds, keeping us involved and wondering what these two will finally decide to do and what role Shanie and Levi might play in it all.

Now though to how I would describe the novel – and for me it is about coming to terms with the past. Both Gordon and Lynne have not had unhappy lives but both have in some way been damaged by their abandonment. Almost half way through the novel, they both say something significant. Lynne, reflecting with real generosity on Patric’s unheralded departure, says

I think he wanted to be free, a free young man. There have been times – many times – when I’ve found myself actually admiring his audacity to grab life, to run with it, to run as far as he could.

She then tells us that her plan is to leave Australia to live in “a farmhouse on a hill in the beloved country [Ireland] of my mother”. In the next chapter, Gordon’s, we learn in a flashback why he commenced his Year of Living Ridiculously. It’s to discover “what it is that makes me feel most alive”. He wants to “to lean over the cliff, figuratively speaking … to live as vividly as possible” – but his chosen method is clearly not working. The idea, though, reminded me of Fall on me in which the son tells his dad that “safety doesn’t always equal life”. Both these novellas, in a way, explore what Wallace described as “living an imaginative life”.

They are both, too, about something Lynne says towards the end, which is that “life must move forward; anything else is sacrilege”, and yet, paradoxically, her wish for Gordon could be seen to be the opposite: she wants him to go back to find what “hurt him all those years ago”.

And so for me, the book is about “living imaginatively” and about liberation, but it is also about how the past can stall us if we don’t get it in the right perspective. Featherstone opens the book with two epigraphs, one being TS Eliot’s “Home is where one starts from”.  I think that, in a way, says it all.

Nigel Featherstone
I’m ready now
Canberra: Blemish Books, 2012
156pp.
ISBN: 9780980755688

(Review copy supplied by Blemish Books)

* for want of a better word for the numbered parts.

MUBA and Patrick White awards for 2012 announced

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I don’t make a practice of reporting on awards  – many of the big ones get pretty good media coverage anyhow – but every now and then something catches my fancy … and so here I am today …

Most Underrated Book Award

Apologies to those of you waiting on the edge of your seats to hear the winner of the MUBA, or Most Underrated Book Award, that I heralded a few weeks ago. It was announced on November 8th, the day after I returned from eight days away, and I simply missed it.

The winner is (was!) Wayne Macauley’s The cook.

Congratulations to Wayne Macauley and the three runners-up, Peter Barry, Irma Gold, and Jess Huon. Please check the SPUNC page which lists the books and how you can purchase each one in both print and electronic format. As SPUNC says, they would all make worthy additions to your Christmas shopping list.

Patrick White Award 2012

Patrick White (if we exclude JM Coetzee who received his award when still a South African resident) is Australia’s only Nobel Laureate for Literature. He won that award in 1973, and in 1975 he used the proceeds to establish the Patrick White Award. His goal was to advance ‘Australian literature by encouraging the writing of novels, short stories, poetry and/or plays for publication or performance’. It tends to be given to writers who have made a significant contribution to Australian literature but whom the judges feel deserve further recognition. Recent winners include poet Robert Adamson (2011); multiple award-winning novelist, David Foster (2010); novelist and short story writer Beverley Farmer (2009), a favourite of mine but I haven’t read her for a while; and poet and translator Geoff Page (2001), whom I have reviewed here.

This year’s winner is Amanda Lohrey. I have read her but not since I started this blog. The judges praised the quality of her fiction – the most recent being her novel Reading Madame Bovary – for the moral and ethical dilemmas she explores and for her prose style which ‘has developed a distinctive grace and lucidity in expressing these complex issues’. The judges also commended her role in developing the creative writing program at the University of Technology Sydney, and her work as an essayist.

Thanks to the AustLit blog for information on the Patrick White Award.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Literary Awards for Short Stories

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Since we’ve been currently talking about short stories – or, at least, I have been doing so here in my little corner of the litblog world – I though it might be a good time to list some of the literary awards dedicated to short stories in Australia. It’s a bit of a lazy post I know, but we are getting to that time of the year and life is getting busy.

There are, in fact, a goodly number of opportunities in Australia for short story writers to win awards, so in this post I am just going to list the ones that seem best known or that have a reasonably broad coverage. Most of the competitions define short stories as those 3,000 words or less. Here goes:

  • The Age Short Story Award has been awarded since 1979. I believe it was the award that kick-started Elliot Perlman’s writing career when he won in 1994. It has also been won by some of Australia’s currently best regarded short story writers like Cate Kennedy and Paddy O’Reilly.
  • Steele Rudd Award for Australian Short Story Collection was part of the recently cancelled Queensland Premier’s Literary Award and was continued this year in the Queensland Literary Awards when it was won by a favourite writer of mine, Janette Turner Hospital, for her collection Forecast: Turbulence.
  • Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, which started life as the Australian Book Review award, has been offered under its new name since 2010. It honours the late Australian author, Elizabeth Jolley, who is one of my favourite writers and to whom I was introduced back in 1988 via her short story “Five acre virgin”.
  • Hal Porter Short Story Competition which in 2012 is in its 19th year, and which commemorates the Australian novelist, poet, short story writer and playwright.
  • Awards for short stories offered by state chapters of the Fellowship of Australian Writers, including the Marjorie Barnard Award from NSW (commemorating Barnard whose collection The persimmon tree and other stories* is one of my favourites) and the Henry Savery National Short Story Award from Tasmania (commemorating Savery who wrote the first “Australian-made” novel)
  • Locally offered awards such as the Alan Marshall Short Story Award, the Margaret River Short Story Competition, and the Stringybark suite of short story awards.
  • Genre-based awards for short stories, such as the Aurealis Awards for speculative fiction which include awards for short stories in fantasy, horror, science fiction and young adult; and the Scarlett Stiletto awards for crime and mystery short stories written by women. Cate Kennedy won the first Scarlett Stiletto in 1994.
  • And, of course, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which is part of the Commonwealth group of literary prizes and is open to all members of the (British) Commonwealth.

There are many more awards, but this list indicates that the short story is pretty well supported down under. However, short stories can always do with more recognition because, despite all the awards, they are still under-recognised and, I think, under-appreciated. I have heard chat around various traps that electronic publishing may be raising the profile of short stories with new audiences … I’ll be watching with interest.

Meanwhile, I’ll close with Australian novelist and short story writer Jennifer Mills who was a regional winner in the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2008. In an interview on the Spineless Wonders website, she explained why she likes the short story form:

It’s very flexible. I love its capture of pivot points, its nearly mathematical tidiness, and its risk. I can pull off imaginative feats in short stories which I would struggle to hold together in a novel. I like the adaptability of short fiction to different delivery modes, like podcasting. As a novelist, I like the gratification: the end of the job is in sight.

Are you aware of short story competitions in your neck of the world?

* I was thrilled when Tony of Tony’s Book World reviewed this collection a few years ago.

Barbara Baynton, The chosen vessel (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 13 Comments

I’m blaming author and blogger Karen Lee Thompson again for this post, because she wrote a wonderful comment on my post on Barbara Baynton‘s short story “Squeaker’s mate”, and I’m going to quote it pretty much in full (I hope that’s ok from a copyright point of view – tell me if it isn’t Karen Lee):

Barbara Baynton wrote some wonderful stories and, had literary politics been a little more inclusive in the days of the Bulletin, I’m sure she would have received wider recognition. Many of Baynton’s short stories, like ‘Squeakers Mate’, turn ‘The Australian Legend’ on its head and, perhaps because of this, the male literary elite (A.G. Stephens, A.A. Phillips for example) chose to modify or explain her work in various ways.

An interesting example of this editorial intrusion is the politics surrounding Baynton’s ‘The Chosen Vessel’ (Baynton’s preferred title was ‘What the Curlews Cried’) which I have read, in its various forms, a number of times. Stephens published it as ‘The Tramp’. It is believed he wanted the title to shift the focus away from the central woman and it allowed for clarity between a ‘tramp’ (an isolated individual) and a ‘swagman’ (a virtuous kind of everyman of the bush). Stephens also cut a significant part of the story before publication.

For anyone who enjoys ‘Squeakers Mate’, I’d suggest a reading of ‘What the Curlews Cried’ (aka ‘The Chosen Vessel’ or ‘The Tramp’), preferably in its unabridged form.

“The chosen vessel” and “Squeaker’s mate” are Baynton’s best known and most anthologised short stories. However, I hadn’t read “The chosen vessel” before and so decided, on Karen Lee’s recommendation, to read the version in Bush studies. According to my brief research, and Karen Lee can correct me if I’m wrong, The Bush studies version is the final complete version Baynton presented for publication. However, it is not the same as the original version which was submitted as “What the curlews cried” and then significantly edited by the Bulletin.

Anyhow, if I thought “Squeaker’s mate” was tough, then this one is tougher. The female protagonist is left alone with her baby, rather like Lawson’s wife in “The drover’s wife”, but this woman faces a double whammy. Left by a cruel husband, she is terrorised by a “swagman” (not a “tramp” despite its first published title). She’s a town girl unfamiliar with bush life, but that’s not what scares her. I won’t detail the plot more because it’s a short story (around 8 pages) and you can find it in the online link below. The shorter Bulletin version, I understand, did not change what happened to the woman, but excised a whole section and thereby effectively changed the meaning of the story to suggest an isolated instance rather than something more systemic.

In the introduction to my Sydney University Press edition, Susan Sheridan confirms my statement in my “Squeaker’s mate” post that Baynton’s main concern was not the harshness or terrors of the bush and the land, which contemporary critics tried to argue, but male brutality to woman and, more significantly, “the impossible position that male culture constructs for ‘woman’ in the abstract”. She writes that woman is glorified as the Madonna, God’s “chosen vessel”,  but “at the same time the capacity for motherhood is regarded as confining her to the animal level of existence”. In “The chosen vessel” religious imagery – the mother and her baby are both mistaken for a ewe and a lamb and as a vision of the Madonna and child – is used to devastating ironic effect.

I’m not surprised that those late nineteenth century men found her writing confronting and that the Bulletin only ever published one of her short stories, but, for me, Baynton’s writing presents an alternative view of life in the bush that I’m glad we have available today.

Barbara Baynton
“The chosen vessel”
in Bush studies
Sydney University Press, 2009
ISBN: 9781820898953

Available online: in Bush studies at Project Gutenberg